“Oh,
Satan! One and unique god of my soul, inspire thou in me something yet more,
present further perversions to my smoking heart, and then shalt thou see how I
shall plunge myself into them all!”[1]

Mrs. De Saint-Ange's prayer could be
the one granted to the contemporary artists who consider Black Metal as an
inspiriting light. Satan offered them the most extreme creative, deleterious,
and maybe richest form. Acting as Odin’s raven-informants Huginn and Muninn
(whose names translate to Thought and Memory), artists dissect a system,
explore the sometimes obscure mechanisms which govern an organization, and
appropriate the esthetical potential of their target. Thanks to the displacement
of the subject and a change of state they deliver a new vision. But does it
mean that, using this cultural artifact as a referent, Black Metal is not an
accomplished art? Does it need to be baptized by art to exist? If both cultural
fields, contemporary art and Black Metal (so-called high and low), seem to be
opposing or conflicting, what enables or motivates their collision? Thus we
could ask ourselves, how do artists use Black Metal as a structural and
thematic foundation for their work? A visual analysis of the referent signs of
this musical genre allows us to observe the principle of revelation brought by
art. The act of recognition presupposes to know already; to see is to learn.
This semiology actually reveals that Black Metal makes the most of art to
enlarge its field of influence. Art has the capacity to suggest more than it
shows and, using hermeneutics, the sign can be exceeded. If many artists apply
a phenomenological approach towards Black Metal, it seems that only a critical
analysis would allow an exploitation of its hidden potential. If art attempts
to capture the elusive, to express the inexpressible, then art as an exegesis
could possibly be its best interpreter. Finally, if this musical phenomenon
witnesses its propagation, what matters to artists is an ability to transform
Black Metal into a new aesthetic category. It means leaving behind the state of
heterotopia to become an ideal genre to which the artwork could aspire to.
Black Metal responds to our need for ritual and, when it is denoted by art, it
reaches infinity. Just as Olaf I, King of Norway (995–1000), spread terror with
its drastic choices, contemporary art offers the possibility to expand and to
become a real Gesamtkunstwerk. This is not a religious baptism but rather a
philosophical one. It is a total immersion into contemporary Thought.